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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Wisconsin was a leader in vilifying the teaching profession thanks to Act 10, and taking education down a peg or two on accountability:

Teacher Shortages Getting Worse: Act 10 is now collapsing the teaching profession, as predicted, just in time for Scott Walker to run for reelection. It seems rural support might be slipping too, as they scramble to approve referendums and deal with teacher shortages:

In 2015, four years after the law’s collective-bargaining limits reshaped the profession, the smallest group of juniors and seniors in two decades was enrolled in teaching programs at the state’s public universities. Some 25% of school districts are reporting an “extreme shortage” of job-seekers for key positions. Wauwatosa Superintendent Phil Ertl told parents at a meeting: “People are being driven away from the teaching profession. It’s not a lifelong career anymore.”

JS: The “Order of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Adopting Emergency Rules” (is) causing big concern in perhaps every school district and independent school in Wisconsin … Who’s going to fill the remaining open teaching jobs we have? Are we really getting the best people we feasibly could to work in our classrooms?

"Not Doing much to Increase the Quality:" This is not the kind of quote you want to hear from a principle when you've got kids in school, like in Bangor, WI.

Beyond Walker's Act 10 Teacher Shortages: The shortages go beyond teachers and their substitutes. And to think, this was all about Walker defunding unions and the Democratic Party to get an edge up in state elections:

Some critics put a considerable amount of the blame on political forces opposed to teachers’ unions and in favor of using public money to pay for private schools. One outspoken advocate of such views is Tim Slekar, dean of the School of Education at Edgewood College in Madison.He called the teacher shortage “a manufactured crisis” and said that changing licensing requirements “will do nothing except dramatically increase systemic inequity and genuinely harm the teaching profession.”“Softening teacher license policies or doing away with the license altogether will kill the profession and turn teaching into a low-wage service sector,” Slekar said.

With all this in mind, it seems we're now having to deal with a whole new set of problems. The effect was predictable. And yet, even after the mass longtime teacher retirements:

No known poll has asked Wisconsinites about Act 10 in the months leading up to Walker's statement on April 1, 2014, and his staff did not cite one.